


thursday's child (never know which way we're bound)

by sara_wolfe



Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Ivan's evil plans, Kidnapping, Long Lost/Secret Relatives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24323470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sara_wolfe/pseuds/sara_wolfe
Summary: Magnum thought he was done with all of Hannah's secrets. Too bad Hannah's secrets aren't done with him.
Relationships: Juliet Higgins & Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV, Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV & Lily Catherine Hue Magnum, Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV & Michelle Hue, past Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV/Hannah
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm shamelessly adapting one of my favorite story lines from the original Magnum PI: Magnum's secret daughter, Lily.
> 
> Title taken from Eartha Kitt's "Thursday's Child"

“I will never understand,” Higgins said, as they pulled into a parking spot in front of the Waikiki Aquarium, “what compels people to cheat on their spouses.”

“Boredom?” Thomas suggested with a shrug. “They want some excitement in their lives?” He was guessing, to be honest; the whole thing baffled him as much as it did Higgins. 

“So they take up skydiving,” Higgins insisted, leading the way to the front entrance. “Just as exciting, but there’s no emotional devastation.”

“Be grateful for the cheating spouses,” Thomas countered, reaching out to pull the door open for her. “It’s the only kind of cases we’ve been getting, the last few weeks.”

“All right, but why the aquarium?” Higgins asked, skeptically. “It’s not exactly the ideal place for an illicit tryst.”

Thomas made a non-committal noise. “Maybe they just really like the monk seals.” Eying the ticket prices at the booth, he asked, “You think they’ll give us some kind of professional discount since we’re here working?”

Higgins rolled her eyes and pulled out her wallet. “Honestly, Magnum.” To the ticket attendant, she added, “Two adults, please.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Thomas promised, as she passed him one of the ticket stubs. 

“We’ll add it to our client’s bill,” Higgins corrected him, stuffing her own ticket stub into the pocket of her jeans. “Assuming, of course, that you didn’t arrange for us to be paid in chickens.”

“That was one time,” Thomas protested, with a laugh. 

“I seem to also remember a goat,” Higgins reminded him. Opening a paper map of the aquarium, she studied the layout. “Well, there are certainly no shortage of places our amorous couple could be, aren’t there?”

“We should split up,” Thoma suggested. “I’ll take the outside section, if you want to look around in here.”

“That’s probably best,” Higgins agreed. “We’ll be able to cover more ground that way.”

“And afterward, we can stop by Kamekona’s shrimp truck for lunch,” Thomas added. Off Higgins’ sideways look, he added, a little defensively, “I skipped breakfast.”

Higgins rolled her eyes again, but this time there was a fond smile tugging at her lips. “Meet back here in thirty minutes?” she asked. 

Thomas agreed, watching her turn and disappear into the crowd headed for one of the shark tanks. Going in the other direction, he headed for the doors that led to the outside exhibits. 

Stepping out into the sunlight from the darkness inside the aquarium had him blinking away spots for a moment, shading his eyes as he waited to adjust to the change in light. When he could see again, he pulled out his phone to pull up the picture their client had given them of her husband.

“Lily!”

Busy with his phone, Thomas heard the faint yell but didn’t really pay attention. It was the height of summer vacation; there were kids swarming all over the place, and everything was more than a bit chaotic. But the second yell…

“LILY!”

A woman’s voice, tinged with desperation and fear, rang out over the crowds. Thomas’s head shot up in an almost instinctive reaction to that cry, looking around until he saw the source: a dark-haired woman turning in a circle, holding a small pink jacket clutched in her hands. Quickly abandoning his earlier plan, Thomas pushed his way through the crowd to the woman’s side. 

“Ma’am-”

“I lost my daughter!” the woman blurted out, before he could finish. “She wanted to put her coat in my backpack because it was getting so warm, and I only looked away for a second because I couldn’t get the zipper open, I swear-”

“Your daughter’s Lily?” Thomas asked. Off the woman’s frantic nod, he went on, “What does she look like? What’s she wearing?”

“She’s five,” the woman told him, as she pulled up a photo on her phone of a smiling, dark-haired child. “She’s wearing a blue unicorn tee-shirt and jeans. I braided her hair this morning, but she’s been playing with it all day, and it might just be loose by now.”

Pulling out his own phone, Thomas dialed Higgins. “Higgy, I’m still outside,” he said, as soon as she picked up. “We’ve got a missing kid.”

Higgins didn’t waste any time with useless questions. “Description?”

“Five year old girl, long black hair, wearing a blue unicorn tee-shirt and jeans,” Thomas told her. Turning his attention back to the woman, he asked, quickly, “Blue jeans?”

“No, black,” the woman told him.

Thomas relayed the new information to Higgins. “Can you find Security and alert them?” he asked. “I’m going to help her mother search out here.”

“Michelle,” the woman said. “My name’s Michelle - well, Mia-” The woman cut herself off when she realized that she was babbling.

“I’ll find the Security office and get them involved,” Higgins told him, at the same time. “Maybe they can shut down the entrances, or something, and I’ll have one of them meet you and the girl’s mother outside.”

“Right, good, thanks Higgy.” Hanging up the phone, Thomas turned back to Mia with a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry; I’m sure Lily’s just hiding somewhere. We’ll find her.”

He’d worked enough missing persons’ cases that he knew he shouldn’t be making that kind of promise, but he couldn’t help it. Not when faced with the fear on Mia’s face. 

“Thank you-” Mia started, but then she broke off when the intercom crackled to life, an announcement with Lily’s details ringing out overhead. Thomas was gratified to see a good majority of the people around them immediately turning to start looking - he hadn’t expected that many people to be willing to help out. 

“Let’s split up,” Thomas said. “It’s a big area out here, and we’ll cover more ground if we’re looking on both sides of the outdoor enclosure at the same time. My partner and Security are covering the indoor section, and some of them will be coming out here-”

“Who are you?” Mia interrupted him. Realizing how that must have sounded, she blushed. “I’m sorry-”

“No, it’s fine,” Thomas told her. “I’m Thomas Magnum. I’m a private investigator. My partner and I have worked missing persons’ cases before.”

Mia let out a short, wet laugh. “Well, if I had to pick a time to lose my daughter, what better time then when I’ve got an expert on hand?”

“If you take the right side of the monk seal enclosure,” Thomas told her, “I’ll take the left. Work your way up from side to side. You want to search systematically, in a pattern, kind of. Don’t zig-zag, or you risk leaving areas untouched.”

Mia nodded, then surprised Thomas by holding out her hand. “Give me your phone,” she said. Before Thomas could ask the obvious question, she added, “I’m going to give you my phone number so you can call me if you find Lily.”

“That’s a good idea,” Thomas said, handing over his phone and accepting hers in return. He quickly typed his name and number into her contacts. “I’ll call you and give you an update every ten minutes, okay?”

Mia let out a shuddering breath. “Right. Okay.” She still looked scared to death, but also fiercely determined, anxiously clenching and unclenching her fists. “Thank you, Thomas.”

“We’re gonna find her,” Thomas said, again, getting a nod in return, and then he turned to begin searching. 

Like he’d told Mia to do, he searched from one side of the outdoor enclosure to the other, slowly and methodically making his way back toward the entrance to the inside of the aquarium. It galled him to have to work so slowly, knowing that every second could be another that Lily was wandering somewhere that no one was looking for her, but he wasn’t willing to risk rushing and miss her that way. 

He’d also called Higgins, keeping an open line between them as they coordinated their searches. Higgins was also working with half a dozen members of security inside the aquarium; another three had joined him and Mia outside to look for Lily. With all the manpower at their disposal, he wanted to believe that there was no way they wouldn’t find her. 

And yet…

The minutes were slipping by distressingly quickly, and still no sign of Lily. Thomas was intimately familiar with the statistics on missing children, knew that the longer Lily was missing, the less likely they were to get her back. And from the tense tone in Higgins’ voice, he knew that she was all too aware of it, too. 

“If we don’t find Lily in the next ten minutes, we need to call the police.” Trust Higgins to voice the thought that had been running through his head. 

“I was thinking five minutes,” he told her, “but, yeah, we need to get HPD and 5-0 in on this. Everyone we can.”

“You don’t think Lily just wandered away from her mother.” A statement, not a question, and Higgins didn’t sound surprised to be saying it. 

“She may have actually wandered off,” Thomas said, reluctantly. “But I’m starting to wonder if that’s the only reason she’s still missing.”

“If we are dealing with an abduction-” Higgins started, but then Thomas’s phone beeped with an incoming call, interrupting her. 

“Higgy, that’s Mia, I gotta take this,” he told her. 

But he’d barely switched over to the other call before Mia’s frantic voice rang out from the speaker. 

“Thomas, they have my baby, someone took my baby-”


	2. Chapter 2

Thomas swore under his breath even as he whirled around and started back toward where he’d last seen Mia. He not-so-gently pushed people out of his way as he tried to find her, tried to listen for her voice over the sound of the crowd. 

“Mia, where are you?” he demanded into the phone, but then he looked over and saw her standing by the footbridge. “Never mind, I see you, I’m coming.” Switching back to his call with Higgins, he shifted his attention for a moment. “Higgins, I’m back. Meet me out by the seals; we’ve got a kidnapping.”

“I’ll call HPD,” he heard Higgins say, right before he hung up the phone. 

When he reached Mia at the footbridge, she had her phone clutched in a white-knuckled grip, tears streaming down her face as she struggled to breathe. She didn’t even try to talk as he stopped beside her; she just shoved her phone into his hand, a voicemail cued up on the screen. Already dreading what he was going to hear, Thomas pressed play. 

_“We have your daughter,”_ a mechanized voice said, completely flat and emotionless. _“Give us twenty million dollars or she’s dead. We’ll call again in one hour.”_

Right as the message ended, Higgins and a pair of security guards came running up. Higgins had a question in her eyes, and Thomas nodded, confirming what she wasn’t asking.

“Ransom demand,” he said, as he handed Mia back her phone. “They left a voicemail demanding twenty million.” To Mia, he added, “Mia, this is my partner, Juliet Higgins.”

“You didn’t speak to the kidnappers directly?” Higgins asked Mia, who shook her head.

“My phone didn’t even ring,” she said, tearfully. “It just went straight to voicemail - I don’t even know how long ago they called.”

“Can I see?” Thomas asked, gesturing for Mia’s phone again. When she handed it to him, he went to the call history. “Eight minutes ago,” he told her. 

“And how long has Lily been missing?” Higgins asked. 

“About twenty minutes,” Thomas told her. “Plenty of time for the kidnappers to have gotten Lily into a vehicle and be miles away by now.”

“What does that mean?” Mia demanded, a hysterical edge creeping into her voice. “Does that mean we can’t find her?”

“No,” Thomas said, quickly, before she could start obsessing over that thought. “No, that’s not what that means. But I won’t lie to you; it’s not going to be easy to find her.”

Mia pressed a shaking hand to her mouth, stifling sobs. She took several deep, shaky breaths as she struggled for control, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief that Higgins silently handed her. After a minute, when she looked back up at Thomas, her eyes were dry and her voice only trembled a little as she spoke. “So, what do we do first?”

“Dispatch is sending officers from HPD,” Higgins told her. “While we wait, perhaps we could look at footage from your security cameras?” This was directed towards one of the security officers, who immediately got on her radio with her boss. 

“This way,” she said, after a brief conversation, gesturing for them to follow her as she headed back toward the aquarium. “We’ll bring HPD into the office, as well, when they arrive.”

The security officer kept up a brisk pace through the halls of the aquarium, winding her way efficiently through the crowded exhibits. She left them at the office after a quick introduction to her boss, then peeled off with her partner to wait for HPD’s arrival.

The security office was tiny and cramped, barely big enough for the four of them. Thomas made sure that Mia got the only empty chair in the room; despite her earlier resolve, she still looked on the verge of collapse. He and Higgins squeezed in behind her, craning to look at the tiny screens monitoring a series of cameras. 

“If you can tell me when you first noticed your daughter missing, Ms. Hue,” Chief Kahale said, “we can start reviewing video footage from there.”

“About twenty minutes ago,” Mia replied. “We were outside, looking at the monk seals. Lily-” Her voice caught on her daughter’s name, and Thomas reached out to squeeze her shoulder, reassuringly. Mia shot him a quick, grateful smile. “Lily calls them mermaid puppies. They’re her favorite.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have enough outside cameras to hone in on specific areas,” Kahale said, apologetically. “The camera we have near the monk seals is set to cover as large an area as possible. And it’s an old system; we haven’t had the funds to update it in a while. It’s just been low on the priority list.”

“I’m sure we can make the footage work,” Higgins told him. “At least it’ll give us a place to start.”

The footage was grainy, but mostly serviceable. The camera was too far away to make out faces, but Thomas could recognize Mia’s backpack on her back. He hoped the cameras in the rest of the aquarium could give them a better view.

The footage showed Mia and Lily near the seal exhibit, the little girl running back and forth as she followed the path of a swimming seal. Lily pulled her coat off and held it out to her mother. Then, as Mia looked away for a minute to wrestle with her backpack, Lily began running after the seal, again. Only this time, when she turned around at the end of the exhibit, a large crowd of people - some kind of tourist group, probably - had swarmed into the space between her and Mia.

On camera, Lily was spinning around in increasingly-frantic circles. There was no audio, but it was clear she was crying. 

Mia made a choked sound. “She was so close,” she whispered, clenching her fists so tightly that her knuckles were white. “She was so close, and I couldn’t even hear her.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Thomas started, but Mia twisted around in her seat to glare at him.

“I looked away, and now my child is gone,” she gritted out. “If I don’t blame myself, then who do I blame?”

“Him,” Higgins answered her. 

Their attention was redirected toward the security footage, where a man was crouched in front of Lily, talking to her. After a moment, he reached out and took her hand, leading her further away from Mia until they’d been swallowed up by the crowd. 

“You blame him,” Higgins repeated, emphatically. “The man who took your daughter. Save your anger for him, not yourself.”

A knock on the door behind them cut off anything Mia might have said. Kahale reached over to open the door, admitting Katsumoto. 

“Why am I not surprised,” were the first words out of his mouth, “to find the two of you right in the middle of all this?”

“Mia, this is Detective Katsumoto, from HPD,” Thomas said. “Katsumoto, this is Mia Hue.”

“Ma’am,” Katsumoto said, holding out his hand to Mia. “I promise you, HPD is going to do everything we can to find your daughter.”

“There’s been a ransom demand since I first called HPD,” Higgins told him. “The kidnappers are demanding twenty million, but they’ve given no other details.”

“They said they’d call me again in an hour,” Mia spoke up. Glancing down at her watch, she corrected herself. “Forty-five minutes, now. This waiting is torture,” she added, softer. “Why can’t they just call me now?”

“Do you have any idea who might want to take your daughter?” Katsumoto asked her. “Any idea why they’d ask for twenty million dollars?”

Mia shook her head. “I’m not rich,” she insisted. “Lily and I are well-off, but nothing like that. There’s no way I could possibly afford-” Her voice broke on a sob. “Are they going to kill her?” she demanded. “If I can’t pay the ransom, are they going to kill my baby?”

“You can’t think like that,” Thomas said, firmly. “We’re not going to let it get to that.”

If he had to, he’d call in every favor Robin Masters ever owed him. He’d shamelessly put himself into a lifetime of debt to the other man. Whatever it took to save Lily’s life. 

“Do you have any enemies?” Katsumoto asked, trying to redirect Mia’s attention to something more productive than panic. “Is there anyone who’d want to hurt you by taking your daughter?”

“I’m a graphic designer,” Mia protested. “I do art for a living; I don’t have enemies.”

“What about your family?” Katsumoto pressed. “Or Lily’s father?”

“My parents run a dairy farm in Idaho,” Mia told him. “And Lily’s biological parents are both gone.”

“Lily’s adopted?”

“From birth,” Mia answered. “My cousin was pregnant, but she wasn’t in a good place to raise a baby, so she asked me to take Lily in. And then she died about a year ago, so this couldn’t have anything to do with her.”

“And Lily’s biological father?” Katsumoto prompted. 

“Some military guy,” Mia replied. “He was killed in action, I think, before Lily was ever born.”

“Maybe there’s something in the rest of the security footage,” Higgins suggested. “None of the other cameras were able to pick up the kidnapper’s face,” she added, gesturing to the screens where Kahale was sorting through various timestamps of various cameras, “but if I could have a crack at it back at the estate-”

“I can make you a copy of the footage,” Kahale offered, already working at it on his computer. 

“Then, I’ll take the security footage back to the lab-” Katsumoto started, but Thomas cut him off.

“Whatever HPD can do to the video footage, Higgins can do faster and better,” he argued. “We don’t have any time to waste.”

“And if you stay with the security footage,” Higgins continued, picking up the thread, “there should be no issues with chain of custody.”

Katsumoto sighed. “Fine,” he conceded. “I’ll meet you at Robin’s Nest with the footage.” Taking the disk Kahale held out to him, Katsumoto turned and left without another word. 

“What’s this Robin’s Nest?” Mia asked, as she trailed Thomas and Higgins out of the aquarium. “Is it your PI business, or something?”

“Or something,” Higgins replied. “Mia, did you drive to the aquarium this morning?”

“I’ve been renting a car since we came to Hawaii, but it’s back at the hotel,” Mia replied. “It’s such a beautiful day that I thought we could walk to the aquarium this morning.”

“You can ride with us then,” Thomas told her. Opening the passenger door of the Ferrari, he pushed the front seat forward to give her room to get in the back. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Especially with the way Magnum drives,” Higgins added. 

The ride back to Robin’s Nest was filled with a tense silence. Thomas could sense Mia practically vibrating with nerves in the backseat. Sneaking a look over at Higgins, he could see the same worry on her face that had to be on his, worry that they’d been struggling to hide from Mia. 

When they arrived back at the estate, Katsumoto’s car was already there, along with a squad car. Katsumoto was waiting near the front door with a pair of uniformed officers, talking quietly to Kumu. As they joined him, Katsumoto handed the disk from the aquarium over to Higgins. 

“We just got here a couple minutes ago,” he explained, as they went inside. “These are Officers Kent and Chung; they’ll be assisting us. And I contacted 5-0 on the way over here; Williams and Quinn are waiting on standby to help out as soon as we have anything concrete.”

“We can work in here,” Higgins said, as she led the way to her office. But, she stopped Thomas just outside the doorway, after everyone else had gone inside. “I’m going to get started on the security footage,” she said, “but just in case I can’t get anything useful from it-”

“I’m going to call Robin right now,” Thomas told her. “If there’s anyone who can get us twenty million in a hurry, it’s him.”

Higgins nodded, disappearing into the office to let him make his phone call in peace. Thomas bypassed the usual routine of calling Robin’s assistant and playing a little song and dance; instead, he called the direct number Robin had given him in case of absolute emergency. If anything counted as an emergency, this topped the list. But, he got Robin’s voicemail, and left a message practically demanding that Robin call him back as soon as possible. He might have even gotten a little abrupt; he’d apologize later, when Mia had her daughter back safely. 

He was about to join everyone else in the office when he felt his phone buzz against his hip, and he pulled it back out of his pocket and swiped the screen awake. ‘Unknown’ flashed up at him from the screen, as the phone vibrated in his hand. He moved a little further down the hallway to take the call; Katsumoto and his team were still getting details from Mia, and Thomas didn’t want to disturb them. 

“Thomas Magnum-” he started, but he was cut off before he could finish. 

“Hello, Mr. Magnum.” The voice on the other end of the line was cold, smooth, and distorted enough that he couldn’t tell if the speaker was a man or a woman. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.”

“Who is this?” Thomas asked, suspiciously. 

“That’s not important,” the voice said. “What is important - at least so far as you’re concerned - is that I have Lily Hue.”

Thomas sucked in a sharp breath, taking an instinctive step back toward the office. The voice stopped him before he could take more than one.

“I don’t think we need to get Detective Katsumoto involved, do we, Mr. Magnum?” Thomas froze. “In fact,” the voice continued, “I think that if you do involve Detective Katsumoto, or your partner, Ms. Higgins, that things will go very, very badly for little Lily, here. Do you understand me?”

“Who the hell are you?” Thomas demanded, his voice low. 

“Someone keeping a very close eye on you, Mr. Magnum. A very, very close eye, indeed.”

“Why call me?” Thomas asked, looking around to try and figure out how he was being spied on. “If you have Lily, why not call Mia? She’s the one you’re demanding ransom from.”

There was a humorless chuckle on the other end of the line. “I don’t care about the ransom,” the voice told him. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to bleed Mia Hue dry, but that’s just an added bonus. No, Mr. Magnum, what I really want is you.”

“What? Why?” 

“If I told you that, it would ruin all the fun,” the voice said. Thomas clenched his jaw, his hand tightening around his cell phone. 

“What do you want?” Thomas demanded. 

“You’re going to leave without telling anyone,” the voice replied. “You’re going to leave your phone there, because I’m sure Ms. Higgins has some way to track you with it, and you’re going to get in your car, and you’re going to drive ten miles east.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it for now,” came the answer. “I’ll have more instructions for you when you reach your destination. You have twenty minutes to comply. And remember, not a word to anyone. I’ll be listening.” With another laugh, the call died in his ear, and Thomas stared down at his blank phone in frustration.

Someone was watching them - him - and he had no idea who, or how. Well, maybe not no idea on how. He wasn’t being watched through his phone; Lily’s kidnapper would never had ordered him to leave it behind, otherwise. It was possible that someone had hacked the estate’s security system; there were cameras all over Robin’s Nest to keep an eye out for intruders. But, they didn’t have audio capabilities, and the person had specifically said ‘I’ll be listening’ at the end of their conversation.

That left one, grim possibility: at least one of the officers Katsumoto had brought with him was actually working for the kidnappers. 

Thomas glanced back toward the office. He couldn’t go back in there to alert Higgins and Katsumoto; no matter how careful he was, there was a chance that their spy would figure him out. And with a twenty-minute deadline, he didn’t have the time. But there had to be something he could do that wouldn’t raise suspicions. 

Pulling up the note-taking app on his phone, Thomas typed out a quick message, then locked the phone. Higgins, Rick, and TC were the only people who could get into his phone; not even Katsumoto had the password. Then he dropped his phone into the planter by the front door. Once Higgins found him missing, her first step would be calling him, then tracking his phone, and hopefully she’d find where he left it, see his note, find the spy, and figure out who was behind Lily’s kidnapping. 

Lily’s life, and now apparently his, was depending on it.


End file.
